So your high-profile documentary has taken in only $1.2 million at the box office, and the DVD is about to hit the store shelves.
Publicity campaign, hmmmm. … How about the subjects of your film sweep the Grammy Awards with five wins the week before the DVD goes on sale?
That’ll work. If your subject happens to be the Dixie Chicks and their struggle to regain their musical voices after dissing President Bush on stage, the marketing effort just got a lot easier.
“It’s been an astounding week,” acknowledged “Shut Up & Sing” co-director Barbara Kopple, a two-time Academy Award winner for her intense and polished documentaries. “I’ve never been so happy about anything as watching these women, who are so enormously talented, do a Grammy sweep.”
“Shut Up & Sing” arrives on DVD Tuesday in a bare-bones edition. A “special collector’s edition,” with an extra hour of documentary footage – and possibly a nod to the Grammy triumph – will come out later this year, Kopple said.
Back in 2003, Kopple and co-director Cecilia Peck had a friend who was also close to the Dixie Chicks, “and kept telling us stories about them,” Kopple said. Thinking the top-selling country act would make an engrossing documentary about women as artists, business partners, mothers and wives, Kopple and Peck pitched the idea to the Chicks.
Maines, Emily Robison and Martie Maguire – the latter two are sisters – declined, saying they weren’t interesting enough to be a whole movie. But they had hired a production company to film their 2003 world tour for small bits on their Internet site. Those cameras were rolling in Europe when Maines, upset about the U.S. invasion of Iraq, told a crowd she was “ashamed” that President Bush was from their home state of Texas.
The furor was immediate, with corporate-owned country radio stations leading a boycott of all the Chicks’ songs. They were denounced in Congress and on the street, with fans trashing their CDs and death threats flying.
Kopple and Peck got back in touch, and the stunned Chicks allowed the documentary crew complete access for the next three years. Ticket sales tanked, the band retreated and regrouped, Robison gave birth, the Chicks teamed with master producer Rick Rubin for a new sound and a new record … and Kopple’s film captures it all.
Kopple held a Grammy party in New York last Sunday night. She said she was surprised that the Chicks’ 2006 music swept the top awards for best album, song, single recording, country album and country group performance. But she wasn’t shocked that Grammy voters wanted to reward the group in a big way.
“The music, the songs, came from such a real place,” Kopple said of the album “Taking the Long Way,” whose production is featured in “Shut Up & Sing.”
“Songs about infertility, about love, about politics. They just really bared it all,” she said. Watching them progress, through the lens of the documentary camera, “it’s almost a coming of age for them, really fitting into their own skins. And bonding with each other so tightly,” Kopple said. “I’ve never seen anybody bond so tightly as these three have. We all wish we had friends like these.”
The Chicks never asked Kopple to censor anything and never saw the movie until it was in the final cut stage. Kopple invited them to a New York editing room, and plied them with wine to soften any potential rough edges. Maines had never heard what Maguire says in the movie’s key scene, when after all the attacks on the band, Maguire tells Kopple she would gladly give up her music career if it would bring Maines any peace.
Maines started to cry in the editing room and put a quiet hand on Maguire’s knee.
There’s been plenty of crying to go around, Kopple said.
“When their fifth award came Sunday night, for album of the year, and Emily kissed her husband (Charlie Robison) and burst into tears, I just lost it,” Kopple said. “It’s wonderful the Grammys could see who they are and what they did.”
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-954-1686 or at mbooth@denverpost.com
